Road User Charging

As the number of electric vehicles increases, governments face a reduction in the amount of fuel related taxes generated. In order to compensate governments must either:

• Raise other unrelated taxes, such as income tax, or
• Create a replacement which also serves the purpose of fairly and equitably taxing electric and alternative fuel vehicles for their use of the public road network.

Kapsch TrafficCom has the experience and technology required to design, develop, implement and operate nationwide road user charging systems that can balance the need for generating tax revenue for authorities with the need for fairness and accessibility for citizens.

The Geo Location Platform (GLP) is the core element of the architecture of our Road User Charging solution.

The GLP enables satellite tolling, road user charging and location-based business applications for public authorities and toll/fleet service providers. By providing toll context management, map matching and rating services via a scalable, device-agnostic platform, the GLP delivers the core processing capabilities to turn location data into a tangible asset.

The GLP streams data from any source into business value near real time.

The Kapsch GLP is the central piece of the architecture when it comes to the Road User Charging and GNSS capabilities deployed in Norway. It is built around the concept of technology agnosticism when it comes to inputs, meaning that it can process data from a large range of devices, including on-board units and trackers, in-vehicle telematics and also mobile applications.

The general process of the GLP follows a simple scheme:

1. Upon starting a new trip, location data is generated by an in-vehicle or aftermarket device and securely sent to the GLP via an API.
2. Once in the system, data is matched against the road network and each km travelled is priced according to tariff data provided by the charging authority. No sensitive customer account information is received or stored by the GLP.
3. Once a trip has been completed a fully rated trip is returned to the driver and displayed with a single price on whichever device the driver has chosen to use.  
4. All completed trips are visible to the driver via their chosen, trusted service provider.

Kapsch TrafficCom partnered with local ITS provider Aventi Intelligent Communication to conduct a road user charging Proof of Concept (PoC) titled JuztDrive as part of a concept selection study.

• The PoC was developed and began rollout in July 2022, focusing on vehicles in the greater Oslo area.
• It was based on a hardware-agnostic Android application utilizing a centralized matching and rating ‘thin client’ model.
• Approximately 30 real world and 30,000 simulated vehicles were captured with the system, each providing positions that were processed by the proprietary Kapsch Geo Location Platform (GLP) and used as a calculation basis for a road usage charge.

The goal of the PoC was to test whether the combination of an existing application - operating on dozens of different smartphones and tablets - and a separate rating engine could deliver a high performance road user charging solution.